Lilia Li-Mi-Yan

Russian photographer Lilia Li-Mi-Yan is interested in the way our identity is shaped by various social factors: she photographed the inmates of the only Armenian female prisons, analysed female make-up customs and traced the owners of particular kind of Armenian vans. Yet Li-Mi-Yan’s most celebrated work is Masters and Servants, a series of portraits of Russia’s new rich with their service personnel — maids, butlers, cooks, gardeners — a strangely intimate study of Russia’s contemporary social order.